[Mailman-Users] mailman gets stuck, stops sending messages

[Steven J. Owens]

Mark,

On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 01:54:17PM -0800, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> >I can't see a mailmanctl daemon with:
> >     ps -aux| grep mailmanctl |grep -v grep
> 
> Note that on Red Hat 7.3, with an 80 column screen, I have to do 
>      ps -auxw| grep mailmanctl |grep -v grep
> in order to see anything.

     Even with -auxw I get nothing.

     However, I just sent a message out to a mailing list and it went
through properly. 
 
> There should be a "mailmanctl -s -q start" running that was started by
> /etc/init.d/mailman. It in turn should have started all the qrunner
> processes which should also be running (a total of eight qrunners
> assuming no slicing). If a qrunner stops, mailmanctl should notice and
> restart it, but if mailmanctl stops too then so does everything except
> receipt and queueing of messages.

     Where is mailmanctl normally supposed to be started from?  I
don't see any reference to mailmanctl in /etc/cron.d/mailman.

     I do see mailmanctl in /etc/init.d/mailman.  Does that mean that
the mailmanctl process should be started on system startup and should
remain running until system shutdown?

     I still want to solve the problem, but meanwhile, would there be
any negative effect to adding an hourly cron job to restart
mailmanctl?  Or perhaps to run a script to check that
/var/lib/mailman/data/master-qrunner.pid is a valid process ID, else
restart mailmanctl?
 
> >The only thing I can find in the logs that looks suspicious is:
> >qrunner:
> >----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >Nov 11 16:19:27 2004 (1060) OutgoingRunner qrunner started.
> >Nov 11 16:19:27 2004 (1061) IncomingRunner qrunner started.
> >Nov 11 18:30:26 2004 (1060) OutgoingRunner qrunner caught SIGTERM.  Stopping.
> >Nov 11 18:30:26 2004 (1060) OutgoingRunner qrunner exiting.
> >Nov 11 18:30:26 2004 (1061) IncomingRunner qrunner caught SIGTERM.  Stopping.
> >Nov 11 18:30:33 2004 (1061) IncomingRunner qrunner exiting.
> >----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> We don't know why the incoming and outgoing runners are  receiving
> SIGTERM, but this will cause the problem because they will quit and
> the master won't restart them. See
> 
>    bin/mailmanctl --help

     I've just learned something new... while I was trying to check for
mailmanctl again, I got:

17:07:30, puff at darksleep:~> ps -auxw| grep mailmanctl
bash: pipe error: Too many open files in system 

     Could be the system is running out of filehandles and mailman's
falling over as a result?

     Could mailman be consuming a whole lot of filehandles?

-- 
Steven J. Owens
puff at darksleep.com

"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
 declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
 this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
 Take it all with a grain of salt." - http://darksleep.com/notablog